60 Building Relationships Between Consumers and Online Vendors: Empirical Findings from Austria

Customer Relationship Management has become one of the major topics in Information Systems. While IS researchers concentrate on the influence of computer-supported systems to strengthen the ties between customers and organizations, the underlying theoretical base has mainly been built and developed by the marketing discipline named relationship marketing. Interestingly, the central definition of what exactly constitutes a relationship remains unclear in both research fields. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach and shows how relationships are defined in scholarly literature. Since the results remain unsatisfying, an empirical survey is conducted to let online consumers define what they perceive to be the crucial attributes of a relationship in general and with an (online) organization. The results indicate that the notion of relationship has to be redefined at least for online communication and interaction and offer practical implications for designing the interaction process with online users